Description

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling (CWE-770) in Kibana can lead to a denial of service via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130). An authenticated user with low-level privileges could submit a specially crafted request that causes Kibana to consume an unbounded amount of memory, rendering it unavailable to all users.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "6.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-09-02T15:17:40.063Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-09-02T15:17:40.063Z",
  "executiveSummary": "This vulnerability pertains to an Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling (CWE-770) within Kibana, which facilitates a Denial of Service (DoS) attack via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130). The flaw allows an authenticated user, even with low-level privileges, to trigger the consumption of unbounded system memory.\nBy submitting a specifically crafted request, an attacker can force the application to exceed its operational memory capacity, leading to a service crash or complete unavailability for all users. This vulnerability represents a significant risk to system availability and reliability, as it does not require administrative access to execute. The core issue lies in the lack of input validation and resource management controls for incoming requests, permitting unauthorized users to exhaust server-side resources. The exploitation of this vulnerability can result in prolonged service interruptions, requiring manual intervention to restore the Kibana instance. Organizations utilizing Kibana are advised to prioritize mitigation strategies that restrict resource consumption and enforce strict authentication and authorization boundaries to minimize exposure to such DoS vectors.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability is categorized as CWE-770, indicating that Kibana fails to implement adequate boundaries or throttling mechanisms for resource allocation during request processing. When an authenticated user submits a crafted request, the application attempts to allocate memory proportional to the request parameters without verifying if those parameters exceed safe operational thresholds. Because there is no internal cap or rate-limiting mechanism, the application process may rapidly inflate its memory footprint.\nThe attack flow begins when an attacker identifies an endpoint within Kibana that processes complex or large-scale data structures. By injecting a payload designed to maximize the computational or memory overhead—such as a request that triggers deep recursion, massive array expansion, or the instantiation of excessively large objects—the attacker initiates the malicious allocation. The vulnerable component fails to implement defensive programming practices like input size validation, object depth limits, or memory-aware circuit breakers.\nOnce the request is received, the Kibana back-end processes the payload, causing the process to allocate memory until it reaches the system's physical or virtual memory limits. This leads to out-of-memory (OOM) errors, forcing the Operating System to kill the Kibana process or resulting in a system-wide state of unresponsiveness. The impact is a complete Denial of Service (DoS) for all authenticated users, effectively terminating ongoing analysis and visualization tasks.\nThe primary requirement for this exploitation is that the attacker must have valid authentication, as the request must reach the back-end processing logic. However, the requirement for low-level privileges makes this a widespread threat, as a standard user account is sufficient to destabilize the service. The vulnerability exposes the underlying Node.js environment on which Kibana runs to resource exhaustion. Post-exploitation impact includes the total loss of availability of the dashboarding and analytical capabilities, causing business disruption and potential data loss for incomplete operations. Without effective throttling, this attack can be repeated indefinitely to prevent service recovery, effectively holding the Kibana instance in a recurring state of failure."
}